.Sucks Seller Accused Of Ripping Off Poor Helpless Celebrities

The company selling off .SUCKS domains is making celebrities and brands pay premium prices to snatch up their .SUCKS addresses before their enemies do first. This is pissing off ICANN, the group tasked with regulating domains, which sees the scheme as a coercive shakedown.

Vox Populi, the company selling off the new .SUCKS domains, is taking full advantage of how freaked out celebrities and brands are about their haters using the power of .SUCKS against them. Vox Populi is charging celebrities and brands between $US2500 and $US25,000 to buy a domain before sales open up to the general public.

So, to stop anyone else from registering TaylorSwift.SUCKS when it's an open market, Taylor Swift would have to pay a premium fee to nab the pejorative domain prior to haters-gonna- hating. And that's exactly what the songwriter did last month. (TaylorSwiftsCat.SUCKS is still available, so apparently Swift's not as concerned about Olivia Benson's reputation.)

Two weeks ago, the advisory body called the Intellectual Property Constituency representing major companies and industry groups asked ICANN in a letter to halt the rollout of ".sucks," calling it a "shakedown scheme" and "predatory."

ICANN.SUCKS

OK, so that's the battle over .SUCKS. It's silly, and it gives us the unappealing choice between rooting for the rich and powerful or rooting for money-grabbing opportunists. But it is also an opportunity to remind ourselves how messed up ICANN is as an organisation, and how chaotic the domain registration system is in general.

A few years ago, ICANN decided to expand its offering with 1,4000 new generic domains — hence, the birth of .SUCKS.

There is no practical benefit to ICANN's haphazard process of distributing domains, other than the fact that ICANN can make money from introducing new ones. There was no shortage of unique web addresses from within the small pool of original domains.

Yes, people want the new generic domains because they make it easier to come up with a short, memorable address. But that's assuming that web users will be able to remember TaylorSwift.SUCKS more easily than TaylorSwiftSucks.com, or that web searches will easily surface the new generic domains. Based on how poorly websites that shelled out for .XXX domains have done, traffic-wise, those are two bad assumptions.

This expansion isn't happening because we're running out of unique Web addresses under the existing set of [generic domain names]. Far from it. It's happening because the body in charge of these things — the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN — thought it would be fun and profitable.

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